The Artifice of Being a Medieval Knight in Elye Bokher’s Bovo d’Anton

A MEDIEVAL WEEK 2022 EVENT

You can register for this talk on our Eventbrite site: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/287940938097.

Speaker: Professor Miriam Edlich-Muth (Düsseldorf)

What does being a knight in a medieval romance entail? The popular romances that were being adapted across Europe in the late medieval period represent a wide range of intercultural encounters and settings that generate powerful narratives concerning the identities of the knights and their implied readers. This paper will consider how the representation of personhood and identity in Elye Bokher’s famous Old Yiddish romance Bovo d’Antona and other Fair Unknown romances offers different templates for what might constitute a knightly identity and invites past and present readers to identify with different aspects of Bovo’s ‘person’. In this context, it will explore how Bovo’s shifting fortunes and wide-ranging adventures give rise to a dynamic model of social identity, in which his social station, masculinity and ethnicity are constantly being re-defined and re-asserted.

Bio:

Miriam Edlich-Muth completed her PhD on Thomas Malory and late medieval romances at the University of Cambridge in 2012. She now holds the Chair for Medieval English at the University of Düsseldorf. Her current research interests are focused on romance adaptation, compilation manuscript contexts and the digital humanities and her more recent publications include two essay collection looking at the adaptation of popular medieval romances across European borders. She is currently working with Renée Ward and Victoria Coldham-Fussell on editing the World of Arthur handbook for Routledge.

Story submitted by Renee Ward
rward@lincoln.ac.uk